


Miracle Worker

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: David Cain Bashing, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt Cassandra Cain, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Worried Parent Bruce Wayne, can you bash david cain enough like fuck that guy, the guy's a monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 01:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20018128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Cass gets reminded about something from her childhood.





	Miracle Worker

**Author's Note:**

> I need to write............ so much more Cass than I do. Also, be warned: I barely edited this.

When Bruce was seven, his parents had taken him to a baseball game. It was a simple match—Gotham Gargoyles, Metropolis Twisters. Neither team was very popular and the crowd in the stands was sparse as grass on a muddy hillside. On that muddy hillside, a few characters stuck out, but none more than the elegant and darling Martha Wayne in a black dress with a white fur thrown over her shoulders even in the heat of summer. Thomas Wayne, and his classic pinstripe suit and sharp-billed hat, couldn’t hold a candle to Martha and the pearls scrolling down her neck and looped around her dainty wrists. No matter where she was, Martha Wayne stole the show. 

They had sat in the front row, directly behind the catcher. Bruce’s father spent the evening laughing amiably with two of his friends he’d run into—Thomas was one of those people who seemed to have friends everywhere, and could probably make loyal companions out of the sewer rats if he tried. Martha had spent the evening looking glamorous and admonishing Thomas for being too loud. Bruce had spent the evening utterly enthralled. 

There was a moment when a batter—Bruce remembered his name even now, Danny Johnston—had hit a foul ball that arched in a long, stretched parabola over the stands. Straight up, taller than the complex itself, and it had rocketed down like a leathery white bullet. Bruce remembered thinking  _ it’s not going to stop, _ and craning his head back, utterly, utterly enthralled—and watching it disappear and then reappear had been like being kicked off through space, the way it turned his stomach with a thrill. 

“Foul ball,” Bruce rasped. He raised a shaking arm and pointed upwards; but his arm was heavier than he remembered, and it hurt to move it in a way it never had. The movement traveled down his arm and along his spine until it cut into the—why did it hurt so badly, there in the middle of his back, why did his lungs feel shot with broken glass—a shot fired and pearls rattled against the pavement like dying whisper-breaths—

“Holy shit, Damian, go get Alfred _ —now.”  _

“Get out of my way, let me see.” 

“No, no, what the hell are you—fuck off, Jason.”

Dim lights. The sound of running water, of humming electronics. A cave, Cave, his Cave, a home beneath a home. 

“Move,” Bruce growled.

Dick grinned down at him. Bruce followed the curve of his mouth to his eyes but the smile hadn’t reached his eyes; instead, those eyes looked like the eyes of the boy Bruce had pulled from the circus. “Good morning. You took a spill, there.” 

Tim shoved Dick out of the way—or tried, but standing a full five inches shorter, he didn’t really have the power to pull the move off—and said, “Do you have a concussion? Was that a stroke?”

“I’m dying,” Bruce said, flatly. “So can all of you  _ move.” _

A broad hand pressed down on Bruce’s chest. Jason’s face winked into view with it, brows pulled together, heavy over his eyes. “Don’t fucking go anywhere, you dumbass, you just passed out. Knowing you, you have four brain tumors, three different types of cancer, pneumonia, and, I don’t know, an infection or seven. Sepsis. You’re definitely fucking dying so don’t fucking go anywhere, you dumbass.” 

“I’m fine,” Bruce snarled, shaking off Jason’s hand. “Back up.” 

“Don’t joke about dying,” Dick said. His voice was deceptively light, but his eyes burned like hot coals. “We already lived that one, thanks. Also, B’s not allowed to have cancer. Or a brain tumor. Don’t ever even  _ think _ about getting a brain tumor.” 

“I outlawed it personally,” Tim said, raising his hand. 

“If you don’t let me up this damn second—”

Dick straightened and leaned back. “He’s cussing, give him room. He’s officially angry.” 

“I  _ was _ angry,” Bruce huffed, sitting up, “five—” 

Fire—fire breathed up his spine and took root inside the vertebrae, crawled in and out like angry hornets in their bitter nest. His vision went black at the edges and even when he closed his hands into fists they shook. He knew, instantly, why he had blacked out, and he knew that he was not standing up without help anytime soon. 

“No, you were passed the hell out five minutes ago, which I know because I timed it,” Tim said, looking at his watch. “You were out for exactly three minutes and forty-three seconds. I wasn’t sure if it was a seizure, so I just started timing it, but I don’t think it was? And, well. You know.”

Footsteps pattered down the stairs. “I can’t find Pennyworth!” Damian shouted. He stopped when he saw Bruce. “Ah. Hello, Father.”

“Hi, Damian,” Bruce said. 

Dick ruffled Damian’s hair. “Thanks for trying, kid.” 

Tim was looking down at his phone, one hand pressed to his chin. “Is your vision okay? Are you seeing anything, hearing anything? Noticed any balance issues? What about nausea, thrown up recently? Or—” 

“Tim,” Bruce interrupted. “Be quiet.” 

Tim snapped his teeth together. “Being quiet,” he chirped. 

“I’m okay,” Bruce said. 

“Just stay there, and don’t fucking move, and don’t ever fall over like that ever again so long as I fucking live, and then you’ll be okay,” Jason said vehemently. 

“Noted,” Bruce said dryly. 

It was only then that he noticed the figure crouched on top of the worktable, in one of his black sweaters and a pair of jogging pants, staring directly at him with dark eyes and a scowl as harsh as the midday sun in the Sahara. Bruce waved at Cass. She did not wave back. 

“Okay, I know I’m supposed to be shutting up, but—”

Bruce sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, Tim.”

Tim groaned. “C’mon! Just play along. I’m worried! You dropped out of nowhere!”

Dick tugged on Tim’s sweatshirt sleeve and Tim leaned towards him, and Dick whispered something in his ear. After a long moment, and a shared, heavy look, Tim blew out a breath between his teeth and retreated to the staircase. Dick tugged on a lock of Damian’s hair, and gestured upstairs; Damian scowled, but left. Bruce made a mental note to sit down with them individually when he could stand without his spine burning white-hot like metal pulled from a furnace. 

Dick crouched down in front of Bruce. “Kids are gone. You can tell me why you looked like you swallowed a barrelful of lemons now.” 

“Barrelful of lemons,” Jason repeated. “Jesus Christ, Dick.”

“What? It’s a fine saying.”

“The hell it is. It’s a Supermanism.”

“Superman says fine things,” Dick muttered. “You’re getting me off topic. You’re lucky you got included in the adults, whippersnapper.” 

Jason stamped his foot against the ground like an angry horse. The gesture made Bruce want to laugh, but the movement would only be painful, with the way his body was designed around a single fractal point. 

Before Jason could say anything, Cass slithered from her perch and hissed, “Leave,” her eyes never once leaving Bruce’s. She was smaller than both of them, smaller by several inches, but she had her back straight and her hands thrown out to either one of them as if to say  _ you each get only one fist and I will destroy you nonetheless.  _

“You heard her,” Bruce said. 

“Cass,” Dick tried. He pitched his voice into something soothing, something calming, the way he talked to victims on the streets, but Cass shrieked at him wordlessly and pushed him towards the door. 

To Bruce, that motion was fascinating, because as furious as Cass was—and Bruce wasn’t sure he had ever seen Cass this angry—the push was gentle, careful. Dick hardly moved, but he looked stricken as if Cass had actually hit him. 

“I’ll go,” he said. “Be easy with him, alright, he’s fragile and old.” 

“I can hear you,” Bruce said. 

“Jay, c’mon.” 

Dick and Jason thundered up the stairs, pushing each other to get to the top first—in recent months, their relationship had gotten a good deal more brotherly. Bruce’s heart warmed at the sight. 

“You,” Cass said, pointing at Bruce, when they had gone. She sat down beside Bruce and pressed a hand to the exact, precise center of his scar and the corresponding titanium beneath it—Bruce tried to hide the way he sucked in a breath.

“You are in pain,” Cass said, her voice thick with rage, “why are here to  _ work.”  _

When his children were angry with him, this was the part where Bruce would ask quietly,  _ can you look at me.  _ If he remained visibly calm, he wouldn’t inflate the argument further, and for some of them—Tim, most notably _ —just _ that line instantly worked to disengage an anger response and engage a more productive response. But Cass maintained eye contact as a rule, saying, _ look at me, understand me _ in a language few people could read. To look away was to refuse that understanding. So Bruce kept his eyes focused on Cass’s, and he kept them pinched at the corners, hopefully displaying thoughtfulness. 

Cass softened immediately. “When you came here I could—” and here Cass pointed to her eyes,  _ see it, _ and then she finished with, “You should stay in bed.”

Bruce nodded.  _ I should have.  _

“Why come here to work,” Cass said, frustrated, “if you knew.” 

“I thought I could handle it.” 

Cass folded up her knees and draped her arms over them. “You are in pain a lot.” 

“Yes.” 

Cass pointed upstairs, and then folded her hands under her head and leaned it to the side.  _ Bed. Now.  _

“Give me a minute. I overdid it yesterday.”

Cass spread her index and middle finger apart and tapped beneath her eyes.  _ Watch. _ She scooted around behind him, pressed a hand to the center of his back. 

Bruce choked. “Cass—”

“Wait,” she said. She worked her fingers slowly, in even circles with varying pressure—occasionally lighter, occasionally heavier. After several minutes of this, the tightness in his back receded; it didn’t take all of the pain with it, or even most of it, but it would be enough to get back upstairs. 

She scooted back beside him. “Good?”

Bruce leaned against her. “You’re a tiny little miracle worker, aren’t you,” he said, breathless, and if tears of relief were pricking his eyes, he’d never mention it and Cass wouldn’t either.

Cass beamed at him, and then she pointed more forcefully upwards.  _ You are not off the hook. _

“How’d you know how to do that, sweetheart,” he said. 

Here she finally broke eye contact, shrugging her shoulders high up near her ears, letting her short hair hang over her face. Bruce tucked a lock behind her ear, so he could see her eyes, and she shot him a tiny, furtive glance, and looked away again. 

“I did not kill him,” she said, carefully, “but I hurt him badly. Cain left me alone with him. For long time. I tried to help. We found… a thing that did.” 

Bruce wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close—those small, cautious hands on his back had been asked to do what Bane had done to him to someone else—and if there was a man that Bruce would consider killing, it would David Cain. It would be David Cain, and it would be a long death, and it would be a death filled with everything that a man like David fucking Cain deserved. 

“You were too small,” Bruce said, guessing. “And you couldn’t break his spine all the way. What did Cain do to you?”

“Shot me,” Cass mumbled. She pressed her mouth to her knees. 

“How many times.”

Cass held up four fingers. Bruce’s hold on her tightened, and his stomach twisted horribly, and he wanted to rip out David Cain’s teeth one by one, he wanted to slice off his fingers, he wanted to break his ribs so over and over until they turned into powdered snow and dissolved in him. 

They sat like that for a while, Bruce holding Cass as tightly as he could as if he could will away the ugliness done to her with brute force, before Cass stood and tugged on Bruce’s arm. Bruce stood, clumsily, like a newborn colt, and let Cass support him to the elevator, where he dropped to the ground again, panting hard. The elevator took them directly to the third level, where the bedrooms were, and Cass held him as they stumbled down the hall. 

Finally, they reached Bruce’s room, and Bruce all but crashed into his bed. After a minute of breathing hard, he tapped the space beside him on the bed.  _ Stay? _

But Cass had already gone. 

-

Alfred cleared Bruce for a light, short patrol a few days later; this and nothing more, he’d said adamantly, and he’d forced Bruce to rest on the couch during the day. Bruce grumbled, but the ache in his back had returned to its normal dull hammer-meet-nail pounding, and Bruce was grateful. 

His kids, however, were still nervous. 

“Tell me if you start to feel woozy,” Tim said. “Really, don’t be… so you about it.” 

Bruce stared down at the city rushing below him, the complex jungle of concrete and steel. Tim had stuck beside him the entire night—never further than a couple steps away from Bruce, never looking away for too long. 

Bruce tapped the comm in his ear to turn it off, and then reached over and did the same to Tim’s. Tim yelped, startled, but didn’t move to turn it back on, just fixing his blank lenses on Bruce’s cowl. 

“I don’t have cancer, Tim,” Bruce said. 

Tim’s mouth flattened. “I didn’t say you did.” 

“You didn’t need to,” Bruce said. “You need to be focused on what you’re doing, not on me.” 

“Yes, sir,” Tim mumbled. 

Bruce sighed. He was handling this wrong. “Tim,” he said. “I just overdid it. That’s it.”

Tim’s lenses snapped back to Bruce’s face. “Overdid it?” 

“It hurt. I blacked out. It is as simple as that.” 

Tim frowned. “What hurt?” 

“My back. Now you need to focus on what  _ you’re _ doing, not what I’m doing.” 

Tim nodded. “Okay. Okay, I can do that. Just—okay. I can do that.” 

Bruce reached out and squeezed his shoulder; possibly, he hadn’t handled it horribly. Possibly. He could’ve had better timing, but at least Tim wasn’t saying  _ yes, sir _ in the way Bruce imagined he must have said it to Jack Drake. 

The night went mostly uneventful—Mondays, usually, were slow nights. It was good to be back in the city, with the melody of traffic so far beneath him and the way the wind stung his face when he swung from building to building. Grappling had been something Bruce had anticipated loathing, but it had become one of his favorite things to do; both soothing and exhilarating, a personal relationship with speed that a car or a horse couldn’t give a person. 

Over the course of the night, all of his kids chimed in to chatter in his ear, except Cass—this wasn’t unusual. The concept of communication without being able to see was one she didn’t grasp well, and she was mostly silent unless called for on the commlink. But Bruce’s gut was writhing like a constrictor snake. 

Half an hour before he was due to head in, he said, “Cass,” into the commlink. He got a grunt in reply, and then silence, so Bruce went back on time. 

“Good evening, sir,” Alfred said, when Bruce swung the car door open and hauled himself out. 

“Evening,” Bruce responded. “Cass is still out. I’m waiting for her.”

Alfred looked startled. “Is anything the matter?” 

“I have,” Bruce said, sliding into his computer chair, “a bad feeling.” 

He waited until well past dawn, cowl pulled back and hands steepled. Tim reported back just before dawn, and left upstairs to sleep after a shower and a quick, one-armed hug. Damian trotted down the stairs an hour earlier to indirectly whine about being grounded and strongly hint that he should not be. Alfred went up to sleep before even then.

At a quarter past six, Cass’s motorcycle roared into the cave. She slid off of it, tearing off her mask with a roar and throwing it at the glass case that contained one of Dick’s old costumes. 

“Cass,” Bruce said, quietly. 

Cass held up the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of her left hand, and she snapped them together in a jagged, forceful motion.  _ No.  _

Her boots had left footprints on the ground. It was hard to see, on her dark suit, the slough of blood down from a wound. 

Bruce pointed to the cot, the one he had laid on and wished to die in when he’d broken his back, and made a flicking motion with his hands.  _ Sit down.  _

“No!” Cass shouted, and she picked up his workbench and upended it, sending projects scattering and shattering across the floor. “No,” she repeated, pointing at Bruce. 

“You’re hurt,” Bruce said. He tapped his chest, right over his heart, and said, “I hurt for you. Now sit down.” 

Cass growled.    
  


Bruce approached her cautiously until he was in front of her, and then he cupped her face in his hands. 

After a minute of standing tense, she leaned into the touch, her eyes pressing shut and her face relaxing.

Bruce picked her up and carried her to the cot, setting her down gently. The stab wound wasn’t especially deep, but he pulled his gloves off with his teeth, administered the local and stitched it up quickly. After bandaging it, he checked her over for other injuries, but her skin was simply pale and unmarred. 

“It would take quite the fighter to stab you,” Bruce said, placidly. 

Cass rolled over, turning away from him. “Deserved it.” 

Bruce was silent. He crossed over to the sink and scrubbed the blood from his hands, and then he went back and tugged on a lock of Cass’s hair. 

“No, sweetheart,” he said. 

Cass jerked her head away. 

Bruce took her by the chin and turned her head towards him. Tears, silvery in the light, were rolling down her cheeks. Bruce tapped the symbol on his chest, and then he tapped the symbol on hers, poking her right at the top of her sternum. “You would not wear this,” he said, “if you did not deserve it.”

She pointed to herself. “Hurt people,” she said.

“You were forced to,” Bruce said. He tapped his chest again, more forcefully this time.  _ Trust this.  _

Cass looked away. “The man that I hurt like you, he—screamed.” 

Bruce dropped a hand into her hair, working his fingers through the tangles. He stood there for a long time, just working his hand through her hair, over and over until he could run it through without any resistance. 

“My little miracle worker,” he said. 

Cass pointed to herself, and then said, “Hurt,” and then reached out to squeeze Bruce’s unoccupied hand. 

“You did not hurt me,” Bruce said. “And you will not hurt me, because I know you.” And then he slid his hand beneath Cass’s shoulders and propped her up while she lolled bonelessly, and he pulled her to his chest—his words wouldn’t be believed, but his actions couldn’t lie to her. 

A tiny, quiet sob worked its way out of Cass’s throat, and then she was sobbing against him—her hands came up to her hair and fisted, trying to rip it out, but Bruce gently worked her fingers free. 

He pressed a kiss to her crown and said, “I’m going to pick you up,” to get her attention, and then he gestured at her and then gestured upwards in sequence. 

Cass nodded. Bruce dabbed at her tears with the hem of his cape. Then he hefted her up and carried her to the elevator, which deposited them on the third floor, and he carried her to his room and bundled her up on the bed. 

“Stay,” she said. “Please.”

Bruce leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Always.” 

**Author's Note:**

> :D I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
